Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal give striking performances in Chloe Zhao’s lushly beautiful, romantic and heartbreaking tale of William Shakespeare’s marriage to his wife Anne and the death of their young son Hamnet, whose loss led the Bard to write perhaps his great play “Hamlet.” As a title card at the film’s start tells us, the names Hamnet and Hamlet were considered essentially the same, alternate ways of spelling it. In Zhao’s drama, Shakespeare’s mysterious wife is renamed Agnes. As little is actually known about Shakespeare’s wife Anne and their marriage, which gives director Chloe Zhao free rein to be inventive. Love, death, pain and hope are the themes.
The film was inspired by Maggie O’Farrell’s award-winning novel “Hamnet” and written for the screen by director Zhao and the author, the resulting drama is more Chloe Zhao’s vision than a true adaptation of the book. Oscar-winner Chloe Zhao proved herself a master of powerful imagery framing human questing and connection in NOMADLAND, and brings those gifts to this tale as well, but in this case in a more intimate way, of two people falling in love and having a family.
While the real William Shakespeare was 18 when he married 26-year-old Anne Hathaway, the director chose to ignore that age gap in casting Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal. In the film, William Shakespeare is a young struggling Latin tutor, now doing farm work for neighboring families to help out his parents who had fallen into debt. Anne, now Agnes, is the strong-willed oldest daughter of a more well-off family, where Will is doing some manual labor. Smitten on first sight, the young tutor offers to teach the family’s younger children, as a way to be closer, in order to woo Agnes.
Beautiful, wild, independent Agnes, for her part, is less keen on young Will, but he wins her over with poetry and persistence. Despite opposition by both families (with an excellent Emily Watson as Will’s severe mother), they wed and have three children, oldest daughter Susanna (Bodhi Rae Breathnach) and fraternal twins, Judith (Olivia Lynes) and Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe).
The drama follows their marriage and the launch of Shakespeare’s career in London, while wife Agnes and the children stay behind in the English countryside. Their bond is strong but nothing is more tragic for any couple than the loss of a child, and it has a transformative effect on their lives and relationship.
HAMNET is visually stunning throughout and particularly magical in the early portions. Period costumes and props are perfectly done. The setting is often a wild English countryside of old forests haunted by secrets and ancient Celtic magic. The film ranges from that wild, natural world beginning to the London stage of the Globe Theater where the play born of tragedy takes form.
Jessie Buckley is particularly moving in this drama, as a wild soul who seems as much a child of forest as anything human. There are references that her true mother was a forest-dweller, with all the magical implications of that, and the daughter is only partly of this staid village world, hints often presented in vivid, visual form. Zhao blends the visual and the dramatic well in creating these characters and their lives but she is aided greatly by Jessie Buckley’s strong performance. Paul Mescal’s William Shakespeare comes across as more grounded but firmly determined to have this wild woman and to build their lives.
HAMNET does not try to answer all questions about Shakespeare’s marriage or the creation of “Hamlet.” The film is, of course, romantic but in a human, passionate and believable way, rather than a conventional film romance. Tragedy breaks that lovely dream, throwing the characters in conflict, as they each grapple with grief in their own ways. Unlike many films this year, this one focuses purely on the personal and the individual rather than the large world, putting the experience of love and of grief at its center. The stunning natural-world photography suggests something epic and enduring, but real focus of this drama are the human emotions, of love and heartbreak, from which comes the creation of something that endures for the ages.
HAMNET opens in theaters on Friday, Dec. 5, 2025.
RATING: 4 out of 4 stars
